Do you have issues with indexing and ranking your website pages? This technical SEO checklist will help you identify and resolve issues that prevent search engines from crawling, indexing, and ranking the content on your site.
SEO has three major types; technical, on-page, and off-page. On-page SEO is everything about your content that you can influence, while technical SEO is mainly about your website's structure and other behind-the-scenes factors.
What is Technical SEO Checklist
It's a checklist where you complete all the tasks to optimize your site for search engines from the technical perspective. Technical SEO is all about:
- Understand how search engines see your website.
- Find all the factors they use to put your site in a rankings position.
- Make changes to improve your site's visibility.
Bookmark this technical SEO checklist to come back if you have finished a task. With that said, let's get started with the checklist right now.
Ultimate Technical SEO Checklist 2022
Some tasks given in this to-do list may not be a part of technical SEO but have an indirect relationship with it.
1. Enable SSL on Your Website
Google's John Mueller said in the past,
“We see it as a positive signal if you can move to HTTPS”.
Google
As of December 2014, Google started rewarding secure sites by giving them an edge over non-secure sites when ranking.
Migrate your website to HTTPS protocol, otherwise, you will lose search rankings.
Let me give you a plugin suggestion for this because this technical SEO checklist is for non-technical bloggers and marketers.
This is how you install it:
- Log into your WordPress site
- Go to Plugins directory
- Search for ‘Really Simple SSL’
- Download and activate it
And you’re good to go. You can also go back to the dashboard to see your progress. It lets you know the number of pages secured with an SSL certificate.
2. Have Only One Version of Your Website Domain
Websites usually have more than one version, for example, h-educate.com and h-educate.com. Both versions will be treated as different websites by search engines like Google.
Here’s how you redirect your addresses to the same version of your site:
- Go to DNS records
- Use the Type A as @
- Add @ as value for www Name
As a result, each version will get its page ranking in the search results which splits your link juice between the two pages. Ensure both the versions are redirected to the one so that you may not lose traffic to your site.
3. Configure Permalink Correctly
Configuring permalinks is extremely important to technical SEO. Permalinks mainly affect the on-page ranking factors of your website.
Incorrectly configured permalinks can cause duplicate content issues too, which will ultimately result in lower search engine rankings for your site.
To configure permalink on your WordPress blog or website
- Go to settings in WordPress dashboard
- Jump on the ‘Permalinks’
- Choose the post name option
Ensure all the URLs on your site have a clean structure. Avoid links like:
http://www.example.com/search/noheaders?click=6EE2Bkehgshfe97534t4jnvt564D9C2&clickPage=OPD+Product+Page&cat=80
Doing this is easy on WordPress; all you need is to go to ‘Permalinks' in ‘Settings' and select ‘Post name' from the permalinks options.
4. Analyze Google Analytics
Adding your site to Google Analytics is not a part of the technical SEO checklist of course. But doing this will help you monitor your site's traffic, page views, and sources of visitor traffic.
With that data, you can work on your technical SEO issues. That's why I have added this to our checklist. For connecting WordPress to Analytics,
- Go to Plugins
- Search for ‘Monstersights’
- Download and active this plugin
This will automatically connect your WP site to Google Analytics. Or else you can also add Google Site Kit plugin for that purpose. But before that, you also need to add your site to Google Analytics.
And here’s how you install it:
- Go to Google Analytics
- Jump on the admin
- Set up the new property
- Select the currency and country
- Add other details
That's all! Now Google Analytics will start tracking your visitors now.
5. Index Your Website in Search Engines (Yandex, Google, Bing)
Bots called crawlers come to your site and then index it to search engines. So indexing your site to search engines is not in your hand of course. But what you can do is make it easy for search engines like Google to crawl and then index.
For that, I recommend adding your site to Search Console and focusing on interlinking your web pages. Index your site in search engines like Google, Yandex, and Bing as well. All you need is to go to Bing Webmaster Tools and add your site.
6. Ensure Your Site is Mobile-Friendly (Technical SEO Checklist)
Today, more people use mobile devices than ever. So if your website is not mobile-friendly then you've already lost significant traffic from users who access websites on their phones or tablets.
Ensure your site is responsive and make sure to check it on all devices.
7. Add Social Media Sharing Buttons
Again, it's not a must for a technical SEO checklist! But adding social media sharing buttons to your website will help you increase social signals as well as user engagement.
Social shares also help in building links back to your website, which will positively affect the site's search engine rankings. All you need is to search for ‘social share' plugins, install and activate it. There are tons of social sharing plugins available right now.
8. Repair Broken Internal and Outbound Links
Broken links are those links that when clicked on do not bring the user to the desired destination. They look bad in terms of design and lead to a bad user experience. Poor link structure affects your site's search engine rankings.
Fix all broken links on your website and remove those pages that are not accessible to visitors. Look for all these pages:
- 301 or 302 redirect to another page
- 4XX error page
- Orphaned pages (pages that aren’t being linked to at all)
9. Get Rid of Duplicate Content
Duplicate content hurts your search rankings and is one of the major reasons for the site's lower rankings. So get rid of all duplicate content from your website, if required use 301 redirects to point them to a canonical copy of that content.
I have already talked about putting forward only one version of your site. This is kind of duplicate content because Google thinks that both versions are different websites. So you must choose one version and redirect all others to it.
You can do these four things to avoid content duplication issues:
- Don't create content on the same keyword.
- Redirect duplicate content to the canonical URL.
- Don't publish the same content that is already published on your site.
- Add a canonical link element to the duplicate page.
Furthermore, ensure all your blog posts rank for different keywords. Otherwise, Google will consider them as duplicate content.
10. Ensure Your Site Have Optimized XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is responsible for making your content accessible to all search engine crawlers. This is a crucial part of the technical SEO checklist, whether you have a WordPress site or not.
Make sure that each page on your site has its URL in the XML sitemap file. If necessary improve the XML sitemap by having dynamic URLs from your WordPress blog.
11. Use Canonical Tags on Your Pages (Technical SEO Checklist)
Using canonical tags is like saying “This page which you found is the same as this page.” to search engines. So if two URLs are pointing to the same content then use a canonical tag to specify it.
This is essential for a technical SEO checklist because this will help Google understand your site architecture and crawl efficiency.
If you have a WordPress website, then don’t forget to add a canonical tag using Yoast or manually in your theme's header.php file.
12. Optimize Your Image File Names and Sizes
Properly name and size your images and change the Extension of all your images to either PNG or WebP. The latter is more widely supported across search engines, but PNG is popular as well.
It's not just the file names and sizes, focus on alt tag and description for images as well. This will help crawlers to properly understand and index your image files.
13. Properly Specify Your Robots.txt File (Technical SEO Checklist)
It's also a part of the technical SEO checklist. This file is important for search engine bots as it shows them the crawl paths on your site. So make sure you specify the robot's file where each page can be accessed by crawlers.
You can add and edit robots.txt file using plugins like RankMath or Yoast. Or else you can do it manually using these instructions by Google.
14. Enjoy the Power of Schema Markup
Schema Markup is a type of microdata that can be added to your pages for better SERP results. It helps search engines understand the information on your site. If you have answered a question, a search engine should also know it.
There's a huge library of Schema Markups on https://schema.org/
Imagine anything like video, reviews, products, and you will have schema markup for it. And it's extremely powerful to up your rankings on search engines.
15. Get Rid of Unnecessary Plugins
If you manage your content on WordPress like me, then don't forget that each plugin can actually affect SEO. Why? It adds a collection of code to your site slowing down your site and do other changes.
Specifically, plugins like ShareThis and AddThis may hurt your technical SEO checklist as they use inline scripts to share a link on your page which is directly affecting the load speed of a webpage.
